thinking + motherhood = feminist

On talking about pedophilia with your child

I like this blog post from Mary-Rose MacColl on discussing pedophilia with her young son. We’ve done something pretty similar to her in teaching our own children about bodily autonomy and the potential for sexual abuse but I really appreciated MacColl’s emphasis on the role of the adults in her son’s life in protecting him so that while he is aware of what can go wrong he also gets to feel safe and learn to trust and attach to people. I’m going to introduce that our talks with the kids, too.

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Eep, eep, eep… there is NO WAY I would tell my kid that these people “have a mental illness” that makes them “harm children”. Argh. No. Is there not enough ambient stigma against mental illness already without deliberately raising our kids on “mental illness = rapes children” from a young age?

Sorry. Yes, the other aspects are good. But this part made me really angry.

Great point lauredhel, and I wondered about it, too, but I read it as almost trying to stop the demonising of pedophiles.. how do you handle the question of why do these people do this when it is asked? It has come up with my 7 yr old when we discussed the topic.

I have no problem demonising people who assault children. And I firmly believe that equating harming children with mental illness does _not_ serve to destigmatise paedophilia, but to add to the stigma of mental illness. Especially to children who haven’t formed a nuanced concept of mental illness yet, but in the wider community as well.

When we’ve discussed it, we’ve just basically said that people who sexually assault children do so because they are bad people, just like murderers and people who rape adults are. They don’t look or sound like bad people – but they are, and they deserve their fate, which is to be taken away, tried in court, and put in jail, so that they can’t harm any more children. My kid’s fine with that approach.

This is on my mind a bit at the moment, since I’ve just discussed with my kid an indecent assault I experienced on a bus when I was a couple of years older than he was (he’s ten). We talked about why I didn’t report it at the time, and how I feel about that now. It was a pretty interesting discussion.

Hi Lauredhel. This is such a tricky issue and a good point you’ve made about mental illness… I don’t know how to get across to children that there are grownups who will harm them. Our son’s first question was why do they want to hurt children? I didn’t want to use evil, bad, wicked, because I wanted to get across the compulsion and also because I try to be honest. Paedophilia is a mental disorder and so I said so. But I can see what you’re getting at. Not sure how to fix it. Open to suggestions.

Paedophilia does not make a person unable to distinguish right from wrong, nor does it make them unable to control harmful impulses. I have absolutely no issues with saying that paedophiles who act on their feelings are bad people. They hurt children, knowingly, in terrible, terrible ways. They are bad.

addit: there are major issues with the whole “paraphilias” section of the DSM, and some good arguments for ditching the whole thing. The DSM 5 workgroup, in fact, reached a “consensus that paraphilias are not ipso facto psychiatric disorders”.